This website is made with a large amount of Joomla 1.5, a salad of third party Joomla extensions and a lot of secret herbs and spices (custom PHP templates, CSS, etc.). You’ll have to read on to find out what temperature I had to pre-heat the oven to.

OK, I lied. I won’t really talk about oven temperatures or cooking anymore – it’s not really my strong point after all. If you only arrived at this page after being drawn in by the allure of a new cake recipe, I’m sorry – there must be lots of decent cookery websites for you to look for, or you can see the photo of mince (cunningly disguised as rat) on the only page that’s remains from my first website.

The real point of this page is a brief outline of what I used to put this site together. Feel free to ask about any particular aspects and see the about page.

So this is all based on a Joomla 1.5 content management system. This means I can add new pages quickly and make use of the variety of Joomla add-ons so that I don’t need to concern myself with writing yet another web contact form (for example).

Some parts of Joomla have been more customised than others. For example, the contact page is very basic and only superficially modified to make it roughly fit the style of this website. Other areas are more customised, including my own site-wide Joomla template.

Two of Joomla’s key failings are the default reliance on tables for page layout design and the rigid hierarchical content structure. My custom template should have pretty much eliminated all tables from the layout and the Joomla Tags component allows me a much more flexible tagging system which allows each article to be part of more than one “category”.

The site is valid XHTML / CSS at launch. We’ll have to wait and see how well it holds together if user generated content appears – it’s not something I’ve had time to test completely.

The actual migration process was simple due to the relatively small amount of content on the website: in most cases I just copied and pasted from the old website and set the publish dates and permalinks to match the original Joomla system.

The previous announcement of a “new website” is below for posterity.

I thought it was about time that I replaced my personal website from last century so I’ve played around with some interesting new software and techniques and come up with something a bit more suited to this millennium.

I hope that I’ve managed to make the best of the limitations of the CMS I’m using in order to come up with a user-friendly way of interacting with the site but there are a lot of things I’ve not had time to get perfect yet. I’ve made a separate post about some of the technologies behind this new site so please feel free to leave a comment or contact me in a more traditional* way if you have any suggestions about how the technical aspects of the site could be improved in the future. No doubt I’ll tweak things along the way but I’ll probably be putting most of my IT-related spare time into KeeFox for the next year or so.

I hope that you should be able to navigate the content here in the usual manner, via tags, related content links and the super crumbtrail (menu) above.

*Yes, I mean an e-mail contact form, not a wax-sealed telegram (though try that if you really want…).